Dear Diary: On Documenting Novices' Development Process

In the development projects implemented by novices, the usefulness of the documentation in the form of comments on the final working code is minimal to guide future implementations. Such documentation does not account for novices' development process, including their choices, the errors they faced, the solutions they found, the sources they consulted, the lessons learned, and the advice to remember or give to someone else. Indeed, novices do not usually rely on their documentation to keep track of the successes and errors they find during the development process. Nevertheless, if enabled to capture various moments of the process seamlessly, novices can produce documentation that has the potential to become a valuable asset for them and other developers. This paper presents Dear Diary, a tool to support non-expert programmers in straightforwardly creating documentation artifacts directly from the IDE.